Did the Venezuelan government donate $22.9 million for an apartment to be built on top of Barack Obama's Presidential Library? No, that's not true: A meme making that claim originated on a Facebook page with a satire disclaimer. The owner of the page is known for tricking conservatives into liking and sharing made-up content.
The meme appeared in a post (archived here) published on May 13 by a Facebook page named "America's Last Line of Defense", accompanied by this text:
Countries give gifts to presidents all the time. Bill Clinton has a 1999 Porsche in his garage from the President of Unified Germany.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Thu May 22 11:57:53 2025 UTC)
The text in the image read:
While Barack Obama was in office, the Venezuelan Government "donated" $22.9 million to build an apartment for his personal use on top of his Presidential Library.
Not one Democrat batted an eye.
According to the page transparency tab of the Facebook page that published the meme, it was run by "Busta Troll," which is the nickname of Christopher Blair.
Christopher Blair is a self-professed liberal from Maine who, for years, has run networks of websites set up to troll conservatives with made-up news items in order to get them to share his posts. A 2018 BBC profile called Blair "the Godfather of fake news," describing him as "one of the world's most prolific writers of disinformation."
His websites usually have multiple satire disclaimers, and the stories very often contain obvious hints they are not real, like category names indicating they are fiction, links to "sources" that instead go to funny or offensive images, or an "S for Satire" logo added to the images used as illustrations. Another telltale sign is the name "Art Tubolls" (anagram for "Busta Troll") for characters in the stories. Blair also frequently pays homage to two of his friends who passed away by using their names ("Joe Barron" and "Sandy Batt") in stories.
Blair's stories have been widely copied by spammy, foreign website networks trying to make a buck by spamming American conservatives with clickbait headlines.
Here you can find some of the many, many stories from Blair's websites Lead Stories debunked over the years.
Other fact checks
This claim was also investigated by Snopes.
